Five years.
Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of when Katrina made landfall. Today is the five-year anniversary of the levee breaches from the storm surge.
On Friday, I was thinking back to where I was five years ago - remembering that crazy morning when Sean woke me up from my intense hangover with a phone call. I thought he was crazy when he told me to turn on the weather and get out. It wasn't until Tina called and made a case for city-wide flooding that I actually got out of bed, downed a diet coke (which was basically all I ate or drank all morning) and started packing. Well, you may remember my posts here and then here, anyway. So I posted on Facebook on Friday morning, remembering how it went down and thanking Sean and Tina and my aunt and uncle for taking me in on such short notice.
But the coolest thing is that I sparked a meme - all of my friends from Nola then shared their "five years ago today" evacuation stories. And some of the stories I knew, and some of them I didn't. So many of our situations were so similar - everyone was hungover from being at the first Bar Review at the Goldmine the night before; so many people had a friend/family member call them, demanding that they leave; so many of us didn't believe that person at first. I think we're the only ones I know who didn't hit traffic. We had I also didn't realize that two of my friends from college had gotten married that day, and I'd kind of forgotten that devi_pavarti had her baby that day, too. I remember talking to Kara two days later; she called to check on me. But reading all those posts on Facebook on Friday reminded me of the play that one of my law school friends wrote, collecting and interweaving all our experiences. I want to see it again, or at least read the script. . .
It's funny to go back and read my posts from those days. I remember all those details as if it had been yesterday (although I'd forgotten the names of the undergrads we took with us). The funniest thing is how concerned I was about my stuff. That was maybe the biggest lesson learned: none of the stuff matters. I learned what to take with me in a hurricane - irreplaceable family photos (namely, the old b/w ones of my parents and great-grandparents), the afghan my grandmother crocheted for me, hard drives, and some clothes. That's all. Everything else can be replaced. None of it really matters.
But as for remembering five years ago today. . . THAT I don't really want to remember. Because five years ago yesterday and five years ago today and tomorrow and so on, I was in hell. I was curled in a ball on the couch in my uncle's basement, glued to FoxNews and CNN, eyes swelling with tears, struggling to parse the conflicting messages from the university, the government, and new law-school friends, and feeling like my entire world had just been thrown upside-down and shaken. The only thing that kept me sane were my cousins' babies. Because how can you feel too sad when you have all of this to play with? [Even though they're seven and five now, those pictures still makes me laugh and laugh.]
So enough of that. All of that was a universe away, and it's a new day.